Abortion Debate Causes University College Dublin Students to Impeach Students' Union President

Months before Ireland heads into a vote on its antiquated abortion outlook, a smaller pro-choice victory has been won on the country’s largest college campus.

At University College Dublin in Ireland last week, students have voted to oust their students' union president. Why? She removed abortion information from a student handbook, saying it put the school at legal risk.

Women in Ireland who have abortions face up to 14 years in prison, according to Amnesty International. The procedure is only legal if the pregnant woman could otherwise die, whether from health complications or by suicide. Otherwise, women and girls often travel to the U.K. to find a doctor who will help them.

Not only that — the country also has a law against even sharing certain information about abortions with people who didn’t ask for it.

Now-impeached Katie Ascough says that’s why she removed details from the handbook about abortion prices in the U.K. and about how to order abortion pills online.

Ascough asked: “Is it fair to impeach somebody for following legal advice and not risking a personal criminal conviction for themself and others?”

Ascough printed new handbooks that told students who they could contact for information if they wanted to end a pregnancy.

One student says that would force her peers to decide between outing themselves as pregnant or hiding their identities to get advice.

The book, which also contains tips on consent, a step-by-step guide on how to ‘not’ sneak coffee into the library, and a recipe for scrambled eggs in a cup, “is full of important information to help students when you’re in a hard place,” says student Sarah Shanahan in a Facebook message to Teen Vogue. “This could discourage students to seek help.”

4,540 students voted in favor of impeachment and 2,032 voted against.

Amy Crean, spokesperson for the impeachment campaign, says Ascough’s removal wasn’t primarily about reproductive politics but rather about “democracy and engagement.”

Nevertheless, the vote on campus comes at a time that Ireland is gearing up for a high-profile referendum on its approach to pregnancy.

Pro-choice activists hope to repeal the amendment, so they can liberalize the existing laws, which are some of the strictest in Europe.

The amendment has led to some horrific situations. In 2016, a pregnant minor who was reportedly experiencing suicidal ideations traveled to Dublin with her mother for an abortion. When they arrived, she was instead put in a psychiatric unit. And before 2013, even abortions to save a pregnant person’s life were illegal. That changed after Savita Halappanavar, a 31-year-old dentist, died in a Galway hospital after going into septic shock following a miscarriage. Her doctors had refused to remove the fetus dying inside her before its heart stopped beating.

Ascough says she originally delegated the publication of the book to another person in the students’ union, but then she heard there was information inside that broke the law. She says a lawyer told her by distributing the books, she and the union risked thousands of dollars in fines.

Although technically illegal, sharing the books doesn’t appear to have posed any real threat.

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“For decades now, students’ unions have been publishing information in freshers’ handbooks on where to obtain abortions outside Ireland,” wrote Ivana Bacik, a law professor at Trinity College Dublin, in a recent op-ed.

In 1989, Bacik and other student politicians at Trinity were taken to court for sharing abortion information in their student handbook. By 1995, a new law was passed that relaxed some of the rules around sharing information about abortions available outside Ireland. Bacik wrote that no students’ union in Ireland has been penalized for sharing that information in their handbooks since then.

The student union’s campaigns and communications officer Barry Murphy, in a lengthy Facebook post, says that last year’s handbook had similar information and broke the law as well. “No case was brought against them,” he says.

In a speech after the vote, Ascough said it was a “sad day for me but … also a sad day for our university. Universities should be a place of freedom of speech, freedom of thought, and freedom of association.”

Ascough has said that people have been out to impeach her “since day one” for her beliefs, pointing to a personal Facebook post by Crean opposing her shortly after the election.

“This is not because Katie is pro-life,” counters the post by Murphy, who also campaigned for Ascough’s impeachment. “It's because of a series of actions where she has allowed her personal beliefs to affect her role.”

Facebook messages to Ascough and Murphy were not immediately answered.